Reading Ayn Rand’s The Foundtainhead again after over a decade. It makes me wonder: When you consider the true greatness that is man’s potential—Beethoven’s 9th Symphony, Monet’s “Waterlilies”, William Shakespeare’s “King Lear”—are you left with nothing but your measly existence and a festering contempt for your fellow man and for yourself? I mean, how can the mundane, pedestrian minutiae of our lives compare to the heights of Alexander the Great, Albert Einstein, and Virginia Woolf? I suppose that’s the rub in Hamlet’s discovery of Yorick’s skull: no matter what greatness one can achieve, at the end of the day, at the end of our days, we are nothing but worm food “stopping a bunghole”. But, alas, our work can outlive us. How many of us can claim that? How many of us want to? How many of us are afraid to?
Wednesday, February 17, 2010
The Plague of Mediocrity
Reading Ayn Rand’s The Foundtainhead again after over a decade. It makes me wonder: When you consider the true greatness that is man’s potential—Beethoven’s 9th Symphony, Monet’s “Waterlilies”, William Shakespeare’s “King Lear”—are you left with nothing but your measly existence and a festering contempt for your fellow man and for yourself? I mean, how can the mundane, pedestrian minutiae of our lives compare to the heights of Alexander the Great, Albert Einstein, and Virginia Woolf? I suppose that’s the rub in Hamlet’s discovery of Yorick’s skull: no matter what greatness one can achieve, at the end of the day, at the end of our days, we are nothing but worm food “stopping a bunghole”. But, alas, our work can outlive us. How many of us can claim that? How many of us want to? How many of us are afraid to?
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